Jeff Echols met me over Zoom to discuss the experience of renovating and caring for his Indianapolis house built in 1939. This is a great example of an old house renovation in Indianapolis.
Jeff is the Director of Brand Strategy at EntreArchitect, and we met through his daily Context and Clarity sessions – now we co-host Context and Clarity Live, which is simulcast every Thursday on Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitch and YouTube. Jeff and I get to talking sometimes, and our Zoom call was around an hour and forty minutes that I had to trim down to about 35. I thought I would share some of what I cut out about the neighborhood that Jeff lives in in Indianapolis in transcript form. The photos of the house in December are pretty but also remind us that colder times will come again. Stay cool, everyone.
About his neighborhood in Indianapolis, Irvington: “There’s some some arts history, journalism history here. It is named for Washington Irving, who, of course, wrote The Legend of Sleepy Hollow. Some people have Halloween in their neighborhood. Halloween is a lifestyle here. Until last year, with COVID we had the longest running Halloween festival in the world. And yeah, well, this the street fair part of it is but Halloween festival runs for a week. And so you have you have all sorts of activities. Like you go over to the the Catholic Church and they have the haunted. They have a beautiful pipe organ. And so they have the haunted organ concert, there’s a there’s a local puppet troupe here, and they’ll do the haunted puppet show and you know, all kinds of things like that. And you have the headless Horseman’s ride to the neighborhood. Yeah, and it’s, it is literally a man on horseback with the coat pulled up, you know, and buttoned over his head. Carrying a pumpkin riding on The horse through the neighbor through the neighborhood. And so it’s Yeah, yeah, the it Halloweens the thing here. And it’s a haunted neighborhood apparently. But yeah, but we do we have ghost tours here. I mean, there’s a number of places that are supposedly haunted. And for the literature fans, there’s a book called The devil in the White City. Yeah, it’s about America’s most prolific serial killer. I have a cousin that said, hey, you’ve got to read this book. It’s Chicago and architecture. And by then we’d already moved down here. And so I started reading this book and not to give it away. Holmes Holmes is the main character. He, I think he takes a train ride. And he goes down by Indianapolis. And he stops in a place and ends up living in a place called Irvington. And I won’t tell you any more about what, what happens in that part of the story. But and so this is a historical novel. It’s based on a true story. That house where he stopped in Irvington. That’s this neighborhood. And that were the house where he lived for I think it was two years is a little more than a mile from my house. And so the ghost tours stop there and other places, but yeah, it’s it’s a fun neighborhood. It’s it’s walkable. Nice parks. And yeah, it’s a nice place to live. It’s a place where everybody’s got a dog and everybody knows each other.”
